Okay thrown in the towel on the G35 Intel graphics. I'm a noob at linux and while I was able to find what looked like up to date drivers for this chipset the instructions didn't appear too clear to me -> http://intellinuxgraphics.org/download.html Yes I gave all the commands on that page and yes I installed the package required to download that code - it appeared to be doing "something" but afterwards what to do wasn't 100% clear. So I've removed the too tall bracket on the 8500, used Envy to install the latest binary drivers, hooked up the danged coax output, and am downloading the latest SVN of XBMC after having done yet another clean install. I'm getting good at the clean install part let me tell you!

Rar, Xrander-dev, alsa mixer GUI, and some other stuff gets setup right up front now. No working lirc yet although I guess I could use my MCE receiver, and the VFD still has me stumped but at least I'm not alone.

Perhaps someone smarter and more experienced than I could get the Intel vid on the ASUS P5E-VM HDMI working at better than 5FPS but as of right now I give up - not worth the stress. Sadly when I went looking for other 775 boards in mATX format not much knocked my sox off that wasn't nearly as expensive, maybe an NVIDIA 7100 board. <shrug> Guys on the AVS forum are saying to stay away from Linux on this board too but I think mostly because everyone wants sound over HDMI - I could care less so long as I can get it out digitally some other way. YMMV but consider some of this before jumping on this $140 board

rodalpho Wrote:The nv7150 board works perfectly; I can vouch for it. If you can't get the intel decellerator to work, just pick up a $30 nvidia videocard from newegg. It'll definitely work.

I had a nice NVIDIA 8500 that I'd used before but it had a tall bracket on it. I've removed it and will ask MSI for a shortie as I'm told they will provide upon request.

In other news, I managed to find a commandline to get my MCE303's IRDA receiver working! First as posted above you need the IRTrans software from http://www.irtrans.de/en/download/index.php but the commandline is pretty cryptic. Quite a bit of "unable to connect to port" sorts of responses. All of the examples I found pointed to things like /dev/tty/USBx including the manual but what's below worked for me and will hopefully assist others.

Code:

sudo ./irserver -debug_code -loglevel 4 /dev/ttyUSB0

This irserver software REPLACES Lircd and can apparently drive the VFD - not clear though. That above command turns on debug mode at max logging so obviously tweak it for your purposes - an example used by someone else can be found here -> http://blog.peter.skarpetis.com/archives/2006/11/ I'm noticing that he talks about a modified LCDproc for the display too but I've not started on that yet, I am hoping that the current LCDproc code can see this device now I hope that this helps out others as this VFD appears to be used in a few places including some of the Zalman cases.

Anyway, it now sees my MCE remote codes and surprise surprise it also sees my MCE keyboard including the letter keys and mouse, no I've not gotten it to move my cursor yet or actually DO anything in XBMC but the codes are displayed on screen Time for bed!

Planning on buying an n630i/Geforce 7100 board too, any problems with drivers under Linux? I'm not an linux expert but can manage around.. just looking for a board without much trouble installing.

Except from the Birdscene, any other problem with 1080p x264 .MKV material? or not yet tested properly?

2. Like many before said, maybe time to get some reference clips and start a WiKi page with results and such.. someone a big webserver with unlimited data....?

(Well dont know what the developers think about this idea, maybe they dont like it yet and they would like to wait till they have reached some more mature state of development.....but I think many people would like such a place to check the HW configurations....)

I have the same mb as rodalpho it works ok but I had to use the graphical safemode to install ubuntu and I had to install the nvidia 169 beta driver to get video working properly and I had to install from synaptic backported_linux_modules to get the sound working.